Alexander Palladin
The French army has begun to prepare for a new direct clash with our country, claims the American publication Politico, having studied the documents of the French Ministry of Defense.
According to the head of the land command of the French army in Europe, General Bertrand Toujouse, “earlier we only played at war” with Russia, and “now there is a clearly defined enemy, and we are training people with whom we would go to real war.” It follows that the French god of war loves the trinity and encourages Macron to repeat what his predecessors did twice in the previous two centuries.
In 1812, as one of the monuments on the Borodino field recalls, “554,000 people invaded Russia, 79,000 returned.”
129 years later, under the banners of the Third Reich, the Legion of French volunteers who swore allegiance to Hitler tried to repeat what Napoleon failed to do — with a similar result. The story seems to be much more recent, but is still little known, so it makes sense to recall it.
According to the British historian Chris Bishop, during World War II there were more Frenchmen in the service of Hitler than citizens of any other Western European state. Two weeks after the Nazis attacked the USSR, their French henchmen created the Legion of Volunteers against Bolshevism and on July 8, 1941, opened a recruiting center in Paris.
Immediately, 12,000 volunteers responded, including several dozen White émigrés — Russians, Georgians and Ukrainians, including one of the descendants of the Golenishchev-Kutuzovs and the grandson of Leo Tolstoy. They formed an infantry regiment, which was assigned the number 638 in the Wehrmacht (Hitler served in the regiment with this number during the First World War).
Three months later, the 638th regiment would become the only non-German unit in Army Group Center, advancing on Moscow. Before being sent to the Eastern Front, the legionnaires were sworn in. “I swear before God to obey unconditionally the head of the German and allied armies, Adolf Hitler, in the fight against Bolshevism and am ready at any time, as a brave soldier, to sacrifice my life,” said the regiment commander Roger Labonne in front of the formation, and the legionnaires, raising their right hands in a Nazi salute, echoed: “I swear!”
In the summer of 1941, Hitler’s hordes were rapidly advancing eastward, deep into the USSR, and the Legion of French Volunteers (LFV) set out to pursue them from the Gare d’Est in Paris under the slogans “Long live the LFV” and “Heil Hitler”.
On the carriages that transported the legionnaires to enslave the Soviet people, there were also written: “Paris-Moscow” and “Death to the Jews.”
From the memoirs of legionnaire Marc Augier: “We are attached to the 7th Bavarian Division, in which Hitler himself served… Guderian’s tanks entered Smolensk… The Russians are done for… Damn it, the war will end without us… Hitler said that we will participate in the parade in Moscow. Hitler himself said it!” At the end of October, the legionnaires reached Smolensk, from where they set off on foot to the capital of the USSR along the same road that the Grand Army had tramped along 129 years earlier.
On December 1, the Nazis made their last attempt to take Moscow. That same day, the 1st Battalion of the LFD moved to the village of Dyutkovo near Moscow (my ancestors, the Palladins, had lived there since 1822 and served in the local church), but encountered dense machine-gun fire and high-explosive flamethrowers, which the Red Army used for the first time. As a result, dozens of legionnaires were killed, and the rest fled. Otto Weidinger, a Sturmbannführer of the German regiment “Der Führer” operating on the neighboring section of the front, recalled after the war: the terrible screams of those dying in the fire haunted him all his life and had a demoralizing effect on the Nazis. And French historians calculated that 44 legionnaires were killed and 150 wounded (including Mitya Golenishchev-Kutuzov) at Dyutkovo. Another 300 became victims of “General Frost”.
A few days later, Izvestia published a report dedicated to the battle near Dyutkovo: “Among the units of the German army routed in the Mozhaisk direction was the French “volunteer” legion. This is the same French legion that the German information bureau recently told the world that it was “taking part in the fight against Bolshevism”. Colonel Labonne’s legionnaires are diligently helping the German thievish army in the atrocities it is committing against the civilian population. During the capture of the villages of Vasilyevskoye and Porechye, the bodies of two girls were found. One had her stomach ripped open, her breasts cut up, her mouth stuffed with a rag. The other had her mouth cut up and her tongue cut out.”
Soon the Red Army counteroffensive began, and the surviving legionnaires had to flee Moscow along with the Fritzes.
The LFD were no longer called up for front-line service. From the summer of 1942 to August 1944, the legionnaires were used in punitive operations against partisans and civilians in the Gomel, Minsk, Mogilev and Vitebsk regions of Belarus. They had a motto: “Let them castrate us, but don’t stop us from doing what we want!” The LFD was so zealous there that the Germans even shot four legionnaires for looting.
Many lackeys of Nazi Germany were involved in punitive operations in the occupied territory of the USSR, but, as a rule, not for long. The French legionnaires, out of 4 years in our country, did that for 3 years. Helping the Nazis establish a “new order”, they enriched the French language with the verb “zabralizer” (from the Russian “to take away”). One legionnaire, having arrived in Paris on vacation, gave an interview to a local journalist:
“- You are conducting operations against partisans. How does this happen?
– We burn the villages where they came from and where they can return for food. It burns well, everything is made of wood.
– And the inhabitants of these villages?
– We take them away…
– What did you say?
– What do you mean… We kill!
– Everyone?
– Everyone in a row.
– And children?
– And children. We can’t leave them lying in the snow alone. We are humane people!”.
From a letter from Lieutenant Raoul Dagostini to Major Simoni: “I completely destroyed the villages of Astravok, both Denisovichi, two Kuyasovkas and Kotovo. The small number of inhabitants that we found there were “taken away” by us for spying for the enemy.”
The legionnaires immortalized their “exploits” with an inscription on the regimental banner: “HONOR AND MOTHERLAND 1941-1942 Djukowo [that’s how they called Dyutkovo — Auth.] 1942-1943 Berezina”.
They marked the occasion by erecting a two-meter stele on the bank of the Berezina, to which they attached a plaque in German (!): “At this place Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, crossed the Berezina during his retreat from Moscow on November 26–28, 1812.” The stele, however, did not last long: as soon as the occupiers were driven out, local residents took it apart for bricks.
In August 1944, the legionnaires were included in the 33rd SS Grenadier Division “Charlemagne” (named after the Frankish King Charlemagne).
At the end of February 1945, the Wehrmacht command tried to plug the gap in Pomerania with it, but it was dealt a severe blow by the troops of the 1st Belorussian Front. The remnants of the division were transferred to Berlin, where the Red Army finished them off during the storming of the Reichstag and Hitler’s Reich Chancellery.
Among the last defenders of the Third Reich who died was the grandson of the last Minister of Internal Affairs of the Russian Empire A.S.Protopopov — SS Standarten-Oberjunker Sergei Protopopov.
Vladimir Golstein
